The Horrors of Pan and Scan
I am watching more weird old movies for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on movies about movies, than I ever imagined possible. The sheer number of antiquated old motion pictures that I have seen over the course of the last three months or so is staggering.
I am REALLY learning a lot about movies nobody has heard of and nobody cares about. All of the highly specific knowledge of Hollywood history I am acquiring through this project will really help me in no way whatsoever going forward.
When my wife goes to sleep around nine thirty or so I crank up an obscurity like 1957’s Four Girls in Town, an utterly forgettable show-business drama about a talent search for the lead actress in a biblical epic about the legendary Jewish queen Esther that attracts four beauties from all around the world (which is to say Europe and the United States) whose only real distinction is that it has never been released on home video in any form.
It hasn’t even been shown on television since the early nineteen nineties but someone must have taped it and then uploaded it to Youtube because a few days ago I watched it and was mortified to discover that, despite being filmed in Cinemascope as well as Technicolor it was being shown in the Pan and Scan format.
Pan and Scan took a gorgeous horizontal image and altered it in order to “fit” television screens in a way that honestly made my heart and my soul hurt.
Growing up Pan and Scan was so ubiquitous that I never really thought about it even though it objectively sucked and genuinely represented an insult to the art of film. Masters of the art form created timeless masterpieces specifically for the big screen, only to have some doofus ruin it in order to make Lawrence of Arabia playable on a ten inch TV/VCR combo.
In that respect Pan and Scan is like laugh tracks. I’ve always hated laugh tracks. Even as a child I understood that there was something annoyingly fake and pandering about the way they manipulate emotion by trying to convince couch potatoes that an unseen audience is guffawing uproariously so you should laugh, and laugh hard as well.
But almost without exception sitcoms had laugh tracks or the analogous howls of an easily impressed, laugh-happy studio audience so we had no choice but to just kind of accept it the way that we choice but to kind of just accept Pan and Scan.
Thankfully we no longer have to just kind of accept Pan and Scan anymore. We haven’t had to in so long that when I see a movie in Pan and Scan I have the same indignant, outraged response as when I listen to an old sitcom with a laugh track. I find myself wondering how we ever could have blindly went along with fake laughter in every television sitcom and videocassettes that destroyed a filmmaker’s perfectionist vision for the sake of fitting an innately, extremely flawed medium like videocassettes.
There’s a lot of stuff that we just blindly accepted would always be part of our shitty, shitty culture and society, on account of our culture and society both being shitty, but that we have been saved from.
We no longer have to endure yearly insults from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, nor do we have to pretend that Dane Cook and Larry the Cable Guy are proper movie stars who should be regularly headlining theatrically released vehicles.
Being assaulted by Pan and Scan made me grateful that it’s largely a thing of the past but also that we don’t have to put up with a lot of other garbage as well, in terms of entertainment and technology.
So goodbye Pan and Scan, you abomination. And good riddance.
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